What is the use case?

I'd argue this is for nobody haha

Nobody using jellyfin plex or whatever needs it: they should just use software transcoding, it's better in pretty much every way.

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steelbrain 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I've traveled around a lot in the past couple years so my situation (read: homelab equipment) has been changing and my usecase has been changing with it. It started out as:

- I dont want to unplug the GPU from my gaming PC and plug it into my linux server

- Then: I dont want to figure out PCI forwarding, I'll just open a port and nfs to the containers/vms (ffmpeg-over-ip v4 needed shared filesystem)

- Now: I have a homelab of 4 mini PCs and one of them has an RTX 3090 over Oculink. I need it for local LLMs but also video encoding and I dont want to do both on the same machine.

But you've asked a more fundamental question, why would people need hardware accelerated video decoding in the first place? I need it because my TV doesn't support all the codecs and I still want to watch my movies at 4K without stuttering.

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doctorpangloss 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You can transcode in realtime in software to your TV. You don't need the GPU at all. Even on ancient USFF PCs.

	▲	selcuka 28 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> You can transcode in realtime in software Sometimes you want faster-than-realtime encoding, such as when backing up your video archive.
	▲	steelbrain 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'll tell my TV you said that and I'll see if it stops buffering during playback :)